Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/136

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THE GODS OF EGYPT.
121

even the days of the month and the twenty-four hours of day and night, became the great and everlasting gods.

There is another Egyptian expression extremely frequent in the religious texts, the accurate meaning of which has never been recognized. Em ser en maāt[1] is now generally allowed to mean "rightly," "perfectly," but it does not literally signify "in calculo veritatis," as Brugsch says in his Lexicon. Ser is the measuring line used by builders, and em ser signifies "ad amussim," "nach der Schnur," "au cordeau," "according to the line;" hence, "with the strictest accuracy." The whole expression therefore means, "according to the strict accuracy of Law," to which is constantly added, hehu en sep, "millions of times." Maāt is Law,[2] not in the forensic sense of a command issued either by a human sovereign authority or by a divine legislator, like the Law of the Hebrews, but in the sense of that unerring order which governs the

  1. P. 575. The sign which I read ser was formerly read hebs, which has the same ideograph. But "in calculo" implies the very different word hesb, and if blundering scribes sometimes misspelt these words, this is no reason for attributing the ideograph of hebs in the very best texts to a word which is only confounded with it by a clerical error. The connection of ideas between hesb and ser is however very intimate. See Todt. 100, 8, hesb su Tehuti em ser maāt.
  2. The opposite notion to Maāt, considered as Law, is asfet, lawlessness, disorder, iniquity.